"Every frame is a painting!" "What a fairy!" The Shanghai Song and Dance Troupe's dance "Crested Ibis" appeared on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Ox, the dancers were flowing and agile, the stage was quiet and dreamy, and the beautiful and moving pictures made netizens praise in unison.
On the morning of the first day of the Chinese New Year, the entry for "crested ibis, flamingo" was hotly searched on Weibo. Originally, some netizens could not distinguish between crested ibises and flamingos, and some netizens launched "science popularization": the crested ibis is a national first-class protected animal, living about 60 million years ago, which is older than human history, and is one of the oldest birds on the earth.
What kind of bird is a crested ibis? The Crested Ibis's Latin scientific name, Nipponia nippon, symbolizes Japan. This beautiful bird once spread all over Japan. By the 1930s, they had only been observed in Sado, Japan. Despite the efforts of local bird lovers to protect the last crested ibis, the Japanese species of crested ibises was extinct in 1995.
In "The Last Words of the Crested Ibis", which won the Shoichi Japan Otaku Nonfiction Literature Prize, Japanese writer Teruyuki Kobayashi, on the basis of a large number of interviews and investigations, tells the beginning and end of the crested ibis's extinction in Japan, and uses simple and sincere brushstrokes to convey complex emotions such as human enthusiasm, desire, contradiction, and guilt for life. The Chinese edition of this book was introduced by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House's "Translation Documentary" series.
The crested ibis, once widely distributed in China, Japan, Russia and other places, due to environmental degradation and other factors, led to a sharp decline in populations, once on the verge of extinction. The classic dance drama "Crested Ibis" of the Shanghai Song and Dance Troupe is based on this rare bird known as "auspicious bird" and "love bird" as the performance object, through moving stories and aesthetic visual presentation, telling the fate of crested ibises and human beings. The dance drama "Crested Ibis" has performed nearly 100 times in Japan, with an audience of 150,000 people, becoming a messenger of Sino-Japanese folk cultural exchanges.
In reality, China's crested ibis protection work has also been fruitful. At present, only China has wild crested ibises, and by 2018, the wild population has exceeded 1700. Crested ibises have also gone abroad, and China has supplied crested ibises to Japan and South Korea. After more than a decade of artificial breeding, Japan and South Korea have re-established artificial populations.
Everyone calls the crested ibises love birds, and one of the special features of their weak viability is that the female and male ibises no longer change their partners after being paired. Unlike mandarin ducks, which do not have a specific partner and object between male and female, once paired, if the bird of the male and female side disappears or dies for some reason, the other party that survives is no longer paired and will always be a lone bird.
In 1981, only 7 wild individuals of crested ibises were found in Yang County, Shaanxi Province, the last wild population of crested ibises in China. In the same year, only 5 wild crested ibises were also found in Japan. How is it protected? There are two schools of thought in Japan. One faction is natural breeding, and Haruto Sato, a bird lover who has long observed crested ibises in the folk, advocates first transforming the environment so that crested ibises in the wild can grow naturally; the other is artificial breeding, using scientific and technological means to help crested ibises reproduce. Eventually, people took the latter approach and captured the 5 crested ibises. Until 1995, artificial breeding failed, marking the complete extinction of the Japanese species crested ibis. At that time, Chinese scientists took a different approach than Japan, mainly to maintain the population, except for a few young birds that have lost their nests. YangXian set up a nature reserve and became the base camp of the crested ibis. After years of habitat protection and improvement, artificial breeding and rewilding training, the number of crested ibises in the reserve has reached more than 3,000, which is internationally recognized as one of the models of endangered animal protection.
The reasons for the extinction of the Japanese crested ibises are complex, including late conservation activities, lack of knowledge of protected species, and failure of the Japanese government to intervene in a timely manner. The Last Words of the Crested Ibis is full of people who question the need to protect the crested ibis. But as the book's protagonist, Haruo Sato, replies, "The crested ibis is more than just a bird. It is a life, and life is irreplaceable, just like our human life. ”
Reflecting on the relationship between humans and nature and regaining reverence for life is an important lesson for the crested ibis and its protectors. Every species is an indispensable link in the biological chain, protecting animals, protecting the environment on which they depend, and protecting the future of mankind.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Shi Chenlu Text Editor: Shi Chenlu
Source: Author: Shi Chenlu